How do Caribbean writers see the British countryside? Do they feel included, ignored, marginalised? In Topographies of Caribbean Writing, Race, and the British Countryside, Joanna Johnson shows how writers like Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Grace Nichols, Andrea Levy, and Caryl Phillips have very different and unexpected responses to this rural space. Johnson demonstrates how Caribbean writing shows greater complexity and wider significance than accounts and understandings of the British countryside have traditionally admitted; at the same time, close examination of these works illustrates that complexity and ambiguity remain an essential part of these authors' relationships with the British countrysides of their colonial or postcolonial imaginations. This study examines accepted norms and raises questions about urgent issues of belonging, Britishness, and Commonwealth identity.

Reading Late Lawrence is a study of a number of the neglected fictional works of D.H. Lawrence's late period: these include Glad Ghosts, The Lovely Lady, The Blue Moccasins, and the first two revisions of Lady Chatterly's Lover. The particular focus is on Lawrence's revisions, and the insights they offfer into the complexity of his writing processes and the depth of his commitment to renewal and reimagining. The study draws extensively upon the manuscript and variant material recently made available in the new scholarly editions of his work.

Peter McDonald offers a controversial reading of twentieth-century British and Irish poetry centred on six figures, all of whom are critics as well as poets: W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. Serious Poetry provocatively returns these writers to the elements of difficulty and cultural disagreement where they belong.

The metaphor of life as prison obsessed Edith Wharton, and, consequently, the theme of imprisonment appears in most of her 86 short stories. In the last several decades, critical studies of Wharton's fiction have focused on this theme of imprisonment, but invariably it is related to biographical considerations. This study, however, is not concerned with such insights and influences; rather, it concentrates on Wharton's skill as a craftsman in consciously and carefully fitting her narrative techniques to the imprisonment theme. Representative tales from Wharton's early period (1891-1904), her major phase (1905-1919), and her later years (1926-1937) have been examined and divided into four categories: individuals trapped by love and marriage, men and women imprisoned by the dictates of society, human beings victimized by the demands of art and morality, and persons paralyzed by fear of the supernatural.

Reading James Joyce's "Ulysses" with an eye to the cultural references embedded within it, R. Brandon Kershner interrogates modernism's relationship to popular culture and literature. Addressing newspapers and "light weeklies" in Ireland, this book argues that "Ulysses "reflects their formal innovations and relationship to the reader. Ultimately, Kershner offers a corrective to formal approaches to popular literary genres, broadening the spectrum of methodologies to incorporate social and political dimensions.

Abandoning the Black Hero is the first book to examine the postwar African American white-life novel-novels with white protagonists written by African Americans. These fascinating works have been understudied despite having been written by such defining figures in the tradition as Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Ann Petry, and Chester Himes, as well as lesser known but formerly best-selling authors Willard Motley and Frank Yerby. John C. Charles argues that these fictions have been overlooked because they deviate from two critical suppositions: that black literature is always about black life and that when it represents whiteness, it must attack white supremacy. The authors are, however, quite sympathetic in the treatment of their white protagonists, which Charles contends should be read not as a failure of racial pride but instead as a strategy for claiming creative freedom, expansive moral authority, and critical agency. In an era when "Negro writers" were expected to protest, their sympathetic treatment of white suffering grants these authors a degree of racial privacy previously unavailable to them. White writers, after all, have the privilege of racial privacy because they are never pressured to write only about white life. Charles reveals that the freedom to abandon the "Negro problem" encouraged these authors to explore a range of new genres and themes, generating a strikingly diverse body of novels that significantly revise our understanding of mid-twentieth-century black writing.

Centering on the British kitchen sink realism movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, specifically its documentation of the built environment's influence on class consciousness, this book highlights the settings of a variety of novels, plays, and films, turning to archival research to offer new ways of thinking about how spatial representation in cultural production sustains or intervenes in the process of social stratification. As a movement that used gritty, documentary-style depictions of space to highlight the complexities of working-class life, the period's texts chronicled shifts in the social and topographic landscape while advancing new articulations of citizenship in response to the failures of post-war reconstruction. By exploring the impact of space on class, this book addresses the contention that critical discourse has overlooked the way the built environment informs class identity.

By closely examining the interaction between intellectual and material culture in the period before the Nazis came to power in Germany, the author comes to the conclusion that, contrary to widely held assumptions, consumer culture in the Weimar period, far from undermining reading, used reading culture to enhance its goods and values. Reading material was marked as a consumer good, while reading as an activity, raising expectations as it did, influenced consumer culture. Consequently, consumption contributed to the diffusion of reading culture, while at the same time a popular reading culture strengthened consumption and its values.

Bruce Kellner worked directly from the collection of often-overlooked novelist Donald Windham to produce this reference work. Entries on books, pamphlets, articles and criticism provided a comprehensive record of Windham's literary development, critical reception, failures, and achievements. According to Kellner, the public has yet to fully embrace the quiet eloquence of Windham's work; like authors Herman Melville and Gertrude Stein, he may be vindicated by time. Kellner introduces the bio-bibliography with a discussion of Donald Windham's background, writing style, and reception by publishers and readers. He likens Windham's subtle style to E.M. Forster, and he suggests that America's action-oriented culture lacks patience for Windham's offerings, which are homosexual but not erotic, Southern but not gothic. The book, which includes an addendum to the introduction by Windham himself, is divided into five parts: Books and Pamphlets, Books and Pamphlets with Contributions, Contributions to Periodicals, Ephemera, and Criticism and Biography. This book is valuable to students, scholars, and general audiences of literature.

A collection of essays on the 1960s experimental writer B.S. Johnson, this book draws together new research on all aspects of his work, and, in tracing his connections to a wider circle of continental, British and American avant-garde writers, offers exciting new approaches to reading 1960s experimental fiction.

Ted Hughes is one of the major twentieth-century English poets. Including a previously unpublished poem written by Ted Hughes, Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected offers new insights into neglected but essential aspects of his work. New essays by his friends and fellow poets Seamus Heaney and Simon Armitage lead a collection of largely new voices in Hughes studies offering fresh readings and newly available archive research. Beyond the poetry and stories, these contributors draw upon recordings, notebooks, letters, writing for children, prose essays and translations. Several contributors have conducted new interviews and correspondence for this book. For the first time, this book challenges established views about Hughes's speaking voice, poetic rhythms, study at Cambridge, influence of other poets, engagement with Christianity, farming, fishing and healing. Close readings of popular texts are accompanied by new arguments and contexts that show the importance of works hitherto overlooked.

The thirteen essays and 'Afterword' in Modernism and Nostalgia: Bodies, Locations, Aesthetics address the multiple meanings of nostalgia in the experimental literature of the early twentieth century. Whether depicted as a felt emotion, a form of memory, or a type of fixation, the essays demonstrate that nostalgia involves a tension between past and present, a tension that modernist writers depicted in order to bring the past into conversation with the present. Theses essays show how modernist writers responded to the upheavals of the period - war, modernization, and a number of geographic and social dislocations - from the unique mode of insight made available by nostalgia. The essays in this collection demonstrate that the nostalgic impulse in modernist literature reveals how deeply rooted in the damaged, the old, the vanishing, and the lost were the variety of efforts to imagine and produce the new - the distinctly modern.

Throughout the ages, vampires have transgressed the borders of gender, race, class, propriety and nations. This collection examines the vampire as a postcolonial and transnational phenomenon that maps the fear of the Other, the ravenous hunger of Empires and the transcultural rifts and intercultural common grounds that make up global society today.

Riven by world wars and cold wars, atrocities and genocides, the twentieth-century was also one of sexual, cultural and ideological revolutions, each inscribed across the fictions it produced. This fascinating new volume re-examines the twentieth-century novel as a form shaped by its problematic, often scandalous relation to the public sphere. Discussing ten groundbreaking texts against the challenges of their milieux, it considers twentieth century fiction as a tradition of transgression, perennially caught between license and licentiousness, erudition and sedition.

Romance fiction is one of the most popular literary genres in America today. New writers are constantly emerging, and students and general readers often have trouble finding current information about their favorite authors. This book provides alphabetically arranged entries on more than 100 contemporary American romance writers. Each entry offers biographical information, a critical discussion of the novelist's works, and a list of fiction and nonfiction by the writer, to help readers enjoy and appreciate the full scope of the author's activity. A bibliography of print and electronic resources concludes the volume. America loves romance fiction. These works are extraordinarily popular among public library patrons and are widely read by high school students as well. Because the genre is so popular, new writers are constantly emerging, as are new works of fiction. As a result, general readers and students have trouble finding information about their favorite romance novelists and their most recent books. Written for students and readers of romance fiction, this book surveys contemporary American romance literature. Included are alphabetically arranged entries on more than 100 contemporary American romance writers, including: Jennifer Crusie Patricia Gaffney Rachel Gibson Leigh Greenwood Nicole Jordan Susan Krinard Sandra Marton Francis Ray Nora Roberts Sharon Swan And many others. Each entry provides biographical information, a critical discussion of major works, and a bibliography of fiction and nonfiction by the writer. A list of print and electronic resources concludes the volume.

This is the first study of the shape and diversity of the literary career in the 20th and 21st centuries. Bringing together essays on a wide range of authors from Australia, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, the book investigates how literary careers are made and unmade, and how norms of authorship are shifting in the digital era.

In "This Bridge Called My Back," Gloria Anzaldua wrote: "A woman who writes has power. A woman who writes is feared. In the eyes of the world this makes us dangerous beasts." Her statement marked a moment of collective self-recognition. "Radical Chicana Poetics" considers this moment as a point of entry into Chicana writings. Offering a transdisciplinary analysis of works by Anzaldua, Cherrie Moraga, Ana Castillo, Emma Perez, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, and Sandra Cisneros, this book explores how radical Chicanas deal with tensions that arise from their focus on the body, desire, and writing. Delving into the subtle differences between the authors, Ricardo F. Vivancos Perez sheds new light on contemporary cultural production and feminist activism, and reflects upon positionality and ethics in Chican@ and Latin@ scholarship.

It is during the nineteenth-century, the age of machinery, that we begin to witness a sustained exploration of the literal and discursive entanglements of minds, bodies, machines. This book explores the impact of technology upon conceptions of language, consciousness, human cognition, and the boundaries between materialist and esoteric sciences.

This book looks to the writings of prolific statesmen like D.F. Sarmiento, Estanislao Zeballos, and Euclides da Cunha to unearth the literary and political roots of the discipline of geography in nineteenth-century Latin America. Tracing the simultaneous rise of text-writing, map-making, and institution-building, it offers new insight into how nations consolidated their territories. Beginning with the titanic figures of Strabo and Humboldt, it rereads foundational works like Facundo and Os sertoes as examples of a recognizably geographical discourse. The book digs into lesser-studied bulletins, correspondence, and essays to tell the story of how three statesmen became literary stars while spearheading Latin America's first geographic institutes, which sought to delineate the newly independent states. Through a fresh pairing of literary analysis and institutional history, it reveals that words and maps-literature and geography-marched in lockstep to shape national territories, identities, and narratives.

By rethinking contemporary debates regarding the politics of aesthetic forms, "Gender and Allegory in Transamerican Fiction and Performance" explores how allegory can be used to resolve the "problem" of identity in both political theory and literary studies. Examining fiction and performance from Zoe Valdes and Cherrie Moraga to Def Poetry Jam and Carmelita Tropicana, Sugg suggests that the representational oscillations of allegory can reflect and illuminate the fraught dynamics of identity discourses and categories in the Americas. Using a wide array of theoretical and aesthetic sources from the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean, this book argues for the crucial and potentially transformative role of feminist cultural production in transamerican public cultures.

Via readings of novels by J.M. Coetzee, Timothy Mo and Salman Rushdie and the later poetry of W.B. Yeats, this book reveals how postcolonial writing can encourage the enlarged sense of moral and political responsibility needed to supplant ongoing forms of imperial violence with cosmopolitan institutions, relationships and ways of thinking.

Why do the dead return? Are the dead lost to us for ever, or do they remain part of the world of the living? This book examines these questions as they persistently emerge in areas as diverse as film, Holocaust testimony, and in the works of thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and the psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. The book suggests that it may be as difficult for the living to get rid of the dead as it is to live without them.

In this book, Lisa Coutras explores the structure and complexity of J.R.R. Tolkien's narrative theology, synthesizing his Christian worldview with his creative imagination. She illustrates how, within the framework of a theological aesthetics, transcendental beauty is the unifying principle that integrates all aspects of Tolkien's writing, from pagan despair to Christian joy. J.R.R. Tolkien's Christianity is often held in an unsteady tension with the pagan despair of his mythic world. Some critics portray these as incompatible, while Christian analysis tends to oversimplify the presence of religious symbolism. This polarity of opinion testifies to the need for a unifying interpretive lens. The fact that Tolkien saw his own writing as "religious" and "Catholic," yet was preoccupied with pagan mythology, nature, language, and evil, suggests that these areas were wholly integrated with his Christian worldview. Tolkien's Theology of Beauty examines six structural elements, demonstrating that the author's Christianity is deeply embedded in the narrative framework of his creative imagination.

James A. Michener is one of the most widely read American authors of the 20th century. He worked as a social studies teacher and as an editor, and went on to write such memorable works as Tales of the South Pacific and Centennial. He also wrote numerous scattered short pieces. Though a popular writer, Michener's importance to the American literary, educational, social, and political scene is now slowly being recognized, and his writings are being used as guides and touchstones for study in American schools. This volume contains a checklist of Michener's major novels and his scattered minor writings, along with an extensive annotated bibliography of works about him. The first part is a checklist of his works, while the second is an annotated listing of books and articles published on Michener from the 1920s to the 1990s. The volume also contains a selected list of reviews of Michener's major works. Two reviews for each work have been selected at random, and they provide an overview of the critical response to Michener's writings over the years.